# Testing Strategy Models and Lanes (2026)

Source advisory: `docs/product-advisories/22-Dec-2026 - Better testing strategy.md`  
Supersedes/extends: `docs/product-advisories/archived/2025-12-21-testing-strategy/20-Dec-2025 - Testing strategy.md`

## Purpose
- Define a single testing taxonomy for all StellaOps project types.
- Make determinism, offline readiness, and evidence integrity testable by default.
- Align CI lanes with a shared catalog so coverage is visible and enforceable.

## Strategy in brief
- Use test models (L0, S1, C1, W1, WK1, T1, AN1, CLI1, PERF) to encode required test types.
- Map every module to one or more models in `docs/testing/TEST_CATALOG.yml`.
- Run tests through standardized CI lanes (Unit, Contract, Integration, Security, Performance, Live).

## Test models (requirements)
- L0 (Library/Core): unit + property + snapshot + determinism.
- S1 (Storage/Postgres): migrations + idempotency + concurrency + query ordering.
- T1 (Transport/Queue): protocol roundtrip + fuzz invalid + delivery semantics.
- C1 (Connector/External): fixtures + snapshot + resilience + security; optional Live smoke.
- W1 (WebService/API): contract + authz + OTel trace assertions + negative cases.
- WK1 (Worker/Indexer): end-to-end job flow + retries + idempotency + telemetry.
- AN1 (Analyzer/SourceGen): Roslyn harness + diagnostics + golden generated output.
- CLI1 (Tool/CLI): exit codes + golden output + deterministic formatting.
- PERF (Benchmark): perf smoke subset + regression thresholds (relative).

## Repository foundations
- TestKit primitives: deterministic time/random, canonical JSON asserts, snapshot helpers, Postgres/Valkey fixtures, OTel capture.
- Determinism gate: canonical bytes and stable hashes for SBOM/VEX/verdict artifacts.
- Hybrid reachability posture: graph DSSE mandatory; edge-bundle DSSE optional/targeted with deterministic ordering.
- Architecture guards: enforce cross-module dependency boundaries (no lattice in Concelier/Excititor).
- Offline defaults: no network access unless explicitly tagged `Live`.

## CI lanes (standard filters)
- Unit: fast, offline; includes property and snapshot sub-traits.
- Contract: schema/OpenAPI stability and response envelopes.
- Integration: Testcontainers-backed service and storage tests.
- Security: authz/negative tests and security regressions.
- Performance: perf smoke and benchmark guards.
- Live: opt-in upstream connector checks (never PR gating by default).

## Documentation moments (when to update)
- New model or required test type: update `docs/testing/TEST_CATALOG.yml`.
- New lane or gate: update `docs/19_TEST_SUITE_OVERVIEW.md` and `docs/testing/ci-quality-gates.md`.
- Module-specific test policy change: update the module dossier under `docs/modules/<module>/`.
- New fixtures or runnable harnesses: place under `docs/benchmarks/**` or `tests/**` and link here.

## Related artifacts
- Test catalog (source of truth): `docs/testing/TEST_CATALOG.yml`
- Test suite overview: `docs/19_TEST_SUITE_OVERVIEW.md`
- Quality guardrails: `docs/testing/testing-quality-guardrails-implementation.md`
- Code samples from the advisory: `docs/benchmarks/testing/better-testing-strategy-samples.md`